marsluay/handwriting-natively

Handwriting Natively is a plugin for Obsidian, a popular note taking app, that lets you write by hand on PDF files using a stylus or a mouse, directly inside Obsidian rather than in a separate PDF viewer. Your handwritten annotations are saved in your Obsidian vault's own metadata, and the original PDF file itself is never changed. When you want to share your work outside Obsidian, you can export either a flattened copy where the handwriting is baked permanently into the PDF, or a separate editable copy that keeps the annotations as their own editable layer. The plugin gives you a compact drawing toolbar with several tools: a pen, a graphite pencil style tool, a highlighter, a laser pointer for temporary marks that fade away and are never saved, a circular eraser, and a lasso tool for selecting strokes. There is also a dedicated eraser mode, along with an optional whole stroke eraser and right click erasing. Text boxes you add are backed by a separate sidecar file and stay fully editable whenever you switch into Text mode. Normal PDF scrolling, clicking, and trackpad behavior are left untouched until you explicitly turn on Draw mode, so the plugin only takes over your mouse when you want it to. Your work is protected by autosave, a recovery mechanism, and an explicit save command, plus commands to export an annotated PDF and select every stroke of ink on a page. You can also clear only your freehand strokes, either across an entire document, on the pages you currently have selected, or across a specific page range you choose, without affecting text annotations. To install it, you download the release files from GitHub and copy them into your vault's plugins folder, then enable it from Obsidian's settings, or you can build it yourself from source using Node and npm. The plugin works on both desktop and mobile versions of Obsidian. According to its privacy documentation, it processes everything locally on your device and does not send any telemetry or rely on any hosted service. It is released under the MIT license.